Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Michael Welker is professor and chair of systematic theologyand executive director of the Research Centre forInternational and Interdisciplinary Theology at the Universityof Heidelberg, Germany. His previous books includeThe Spirit in Creation and New Creation andThe Work of the Spirit.

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The Spirit in Creation and New Creation

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.............................................................................................................................................ixIntroduction Michael Welker................................................................................................................................xiThe Hidden Work of the Spirit in Creation John Polkinghorne................................................................................................3The Spirit of God in Evolutionary History Denis Alexander..................................................................................................11Hovering Over Waters: Spirit and the Ordering of Creation Jeffrey Schloss..................................................................................26Mathematics of Infinity and the Orthodox Name Worshipping Spiritual Tradition Vladimir Katasonov...........................................................50The Spirit of Life Jürgen Moltmann....................................................................................................................65The Spirit or/and Spirits in Creation? Recalling the Seventh Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Canberra Vladimir Shmaliy........................79How Exactly Is the Spirit Present in Creation? The Hesychast Reception of Natural Theology and Its Modern Implications Sergey Horujy.......................95Convergence between Theology and Science: Patterns from the Early Christian Era Cyril Hovorun..............................................................111Challenges of a Consistent Christian Language for the Creativity of God's Spirit Friederike Nüssel....................................................120The Human Spirit and the Spirit of God Michael Welker......................................................................................................134'Keep Thy Mind in Hell and Despair Not': Implications for Psychosocial Work with Survivors of Political Violence Renos K. Papadopoulos.....................143Pneumatology and the New Creation in the Macarian Writings: An Ecumenical Legacy Marcus Plested............................................................161The Holy Spirit in Creation and Re-Creation: The Byzantine Fathers Andrew Louth............................................................................171AUTHORS.....................................................................................................................................................203

Chapter One

The Hidden Work of the Spirit in Creation

John Polkinghorne

Western iconography of the Holy Trinity represents the Father as a kingly figure and the Son as the crucified Christ, but the Spirit is represented only by the modest figure of a dove. Eastern Orthodoxy, with the three angelic figures of the Old Testament Trinity, is much more even-handed in its iconic treatment of the divine Persons. Yet in that tradition also there is the recognition of a certain degree of hidden character in the work of the Spirit. Vladimir Lossky wrote:

The divine persons do not assert themselves, but one bears witness to another. It is for this reason that St John Damascene said that 'The Son is the image of the Father, and the Spirit is the image of the Son.' It follows that the third Hypostasis of the Trinity is the only one not having His image in one of the Persons. The Holy Spirit, as Person, remains unmanifested, concealing Himself in His very appearing.

There is, it seems, a kenotic self-effacement present in the activities of the Spirit, whose full revealing is awaiting fulfilment in the eschatological assembly of the community of the redeemed. To which we must surely add, awaiting also the total transformation of this suffering world into the world of God's new creation, for the Spirit is not concerned with the redemption of humanity alone. The Spirit hovered over the waters of chaos (Genesis 1:2) and participates in the travail of creation (Romans 8:26; the word translated 'sighs' derives from the same Greek root as the creaturely 'groaning' of vv. 22-3). The seed event from which the whole new creation grows is the Resurrection and Romans 1:4 tells us that Christ was 'declared to be Son of God with power according to the Spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead.'

This hidden character of the Spirit appears to be reflected in much contemporary Christian understanding and practice. Outside of the charismatic movement, many believers may seemto have only rather vague notions about the Holy Spirit. Pentecost is the Great Festival that probably attracts the least attention in the Church and it is often referred to simply as 'the birthday of the Church,' rather than as the day of the 'Pouring of the Spirit.'

If this is the case within the community of the faithful, what help could pneumatology hope to receive from the outside by way of scientific insight? The method of science is to view the world from a single perspective, focused on the physical and biological and framing its discourse in terms of the unfolding of impersonal processes, while at the same time bracketing out questions of the presence of meaning and value in what is going on. The narrowness of this view has enabled science to make great progress within its self-limited domain of understanding, but it leaves scant room, one might suppose, for any discernment of a spiritual dimension of reality, let alone the recognition of the work of the Holy Spirit. The founding figures of modern physics, such as Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, certainly believed in a spiritual dimension to reality. Newton was happy to suppose that if there were instabilities in the solar system, they would be corrected by angelic action. Yet, by the middle of the eighteenth century science appeared to have banished all notion of spirit from a world whose true character seemed to be that of clockwork mechanism. Books were written with titles such as Man the Machine (de la Mettrie). This situation was not significantly altered by the nineteenth-century discovery of field theories, made at the hands of Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell (both sincere Christians). Despite what some theologians seem to suppose, there is nothing intrinsically spiritual about classical fields. They are carriers of energy and momentum and their equations are as rigidly deterministic as those of Newtonian particle dynamics. Another misapprehension with some currency in the theological world is that somehow the notion of energy itself has a spiritual character. This is not the case. Einstein's celebrated equation, E = mc², can be read in both directions, as much asserting the materiality of energy as the energetic character of matter. The nineteenth century's picture of the physical world was as aridly spiritless as that of the eighteenth century.

However, reality fights back against a crass physicalism and the twentieth century saw the death of a merely mechanical way of viewing the universe. At the beginning of the century, the discovery of quantum theory showed that the subatomic world is cloudy and fitful, with intrinsic unpredictabilities present in it that serve to imply that it is something more subtle than a realm of mere mechanism. In the middle of the century, the discovery of the intrinsic unpredictabilities of chaos...